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Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Guilt and Shame and Crime

When people do something wrong, there are two distinct
emotions that they commonly experience:guilt and shame.These emotions
differ based on what people feel bad about.When people feel bad about the action they performed, then they
experience guilt.When they feel bad
about themselves for having done something bad, then they experience shame.

How do these emotions influence future behavior?

An interesting paper in the March 2014 issue of Psychological Scienceby
June Tangney, Jeffrey Stuewig, and Andres Martinez explored this question with
people who had served time in prison for a felony conviction.

The participants were nearly 500 individuals.While they were still in prison, they were
given an assessment of their tendency to experience guilt and shame following
bad behaviors.They were also given a
measure that examined whether they tended to blame circumstances for their
actions rather than themselves. Blaming
the circumstance is called externalizing
blame, and is often associated with continued bad behavior.That is, people who do not accept their own
responsibility for their actions are less likely to change their behavior in
ways that will reduce bad behavior than those who do accept responsibility for
their actions.

The participants were also contacted a year after being
released from prison.They were asked to
report whether they had been arrested for crimes in that year and whether they
had participated in crimes for which they were not arrested.The researchers also looked up arrest records
in the FBI database.

The researchers then looked at statistical relationships
between guilt, shame, the tendency to externalize blame, and the likelihood of
continuing to commit crimes.

Guilt and shame had very different influences on future
behavior.Guilt had a negative
relationship with future crime.People
with a strong tendency to experience guilt were less likely to commit
additional crimes than those with a weak tendency to experience guilt.

Shame had a more complicated relationship to future
behavior.

Shame was positively related to people’s tendency to
externalize blame.So, people who feel
bad about themselves after performing a bad action will often try to blame the
circumstance rather than themselves in order to help them repair the damage to
their self-esteem.Statistically, the
more people externalized blame, they more that they tended to continue to
commit crimes after being released from prison.

However, once the researchers accounted for the influence of
shame on externalizing blame, shame tended to decrease future bad
behaviors.

What does this mean?

The problem with shame is that it causes people to feel bad
about themselves.People who deal with
shame by externalizing blame will not work to change their behavior.

However, if people experience shame without externalizing
blame, then they will act more like people who feel guilty.Both shame and guilt are negative emotions,
and so people will work to find ways to avoid feeling bad.One good way to keep from experiencing guilt
or shame is to change behavior.

This research also helps to demonstrate why the way we
categorize the world is so important.People
experience shame when they use bad actions they have performed to categorize
themselves as bad people.People
experience guilt when they think of themselves as people who happened to
perform a bad action.It feels easier to
change your behavior when you are focused on changing an action than when you
feel like you have to change who you are at your core.